(Editor's Note: Gordon Rahman discusses some of his graphics work in the recent development of a game in response to the Holiday Game Programming Challenge.)
Let's Begin...
Don't expect long sentences in this article. If you need to create graphics for a game, your time is better spent creating the actual graphics. Moreover, my English is too bad to do better. Plan in short steps.
The Plan
I wrote this article as a result of my effort to write a game for the game contest. This may not be for the very beginners. But there may be a lesson or two to be learned.
- Before creating graphics, the programmer must decided what kind of game to program. For the contest, I decided to program the game of LUDO. Everybody knows the rules of the game. Our game will play against one human. We (the computer robots) will hunt that human player down and be nice to each other. Ok let's not build in cheating dices yet!
- For the game I developed, four major screens were needed:
- The setup screen
- The Game screen
- The Pause screen
- Quit screen
Here are the screen graphics I created:
The Setup Screen displays a single time. The player can select how many robots will join the game against him. The robots are called "Androids" in this game. By pressing the red, green or blue buttons, the Androids are selected and deselected. After pressing the yellow player button, the game starts.
With the Game Screen, the player can click on the turning dice, which causes the dice stops turning. The player can now make a move. Moves are directed by the HeadMaster Android. In the Game Screen shown above, all the Androids have been deselected. The Christmasbells are there to comply with the contest rule that required that the game must have something to do with the Season.
The Pause Screen will show up every time you press ESC or the right mouse button. That is standard procedure in game land. After clicking the QUIT button you will face the Game Over screen.
In addition to the screens shown above, several popup screens were developed. The popup screens consisted of prompts and notice screens to help with game operation, including one to enable players to cheat.
All my screens were developed by assembling graphic components. For example, all of the following components became part of the Setup Screen.
- In addition to the main screens, there were more than 60 small, miscellaneous graphic items that I had to create as I developed this game. A few of them are shown below.
I used Adobe Photoshop to make my drawings. I'm no hero with Photoshop. Everything I learned while using Photoshop, I saved. I surfed the INTERNET to get ideas. I borrowed some buttons from the Freesite locations. I changed most (all) items to suite my taste. I used the SPRITE mask maker from Alyce Watson's Liberty BASIC Workshop
Other Hints and Tips When Developing Graphics and Game Code
- Study the Liberty BASIC Newsletters for guidelines and tips as you program. There is no sense reinventing the wheel.
- Make a decision about your display size early in the process. This decision affects all the graphic decisions that come later.
- Create subdirectories for all of your game components in advance. It's particularly helpful for bitmaps.
- Multiple sprite images (especially sequentialsprite images) should be combined into a single image whenever possible. This saves uploading time and makes the game programmer's code look efficient.
Gordon Rahman -- grahman@planet.nl